


Selective Evolution

by corialis



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corialis/pseuds/corialis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a splice is a complicated business. So is being a teenage girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Selective Evolution

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iluvdanimal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iluvdanimal/gifts).



> Warning for a slight bit of timeline fiddling. I tried. If canon can play fast and loose then so can I.

Splices don’t quite blend into human society properly. The technology was too messy at first, too hard to get the fundamentals of it right and keep the human impulses at least somewhat intact. More important that they keep the products from being a drooling cell clump rather than worry about leaving a few scales behind.

It got better, but they never ironed it out entirely. For a while Kiza didn’t understand—surely with the ability to regrow a life they could touch up the aesthetics.

Later it made sense. Couldn’t have them sneaking up on you, after all. It simply wouldn’t do to treat a splice the same way you would a full human, even accidentally.

—

By an Earth human’s standard of age measurement, Kiza is 11 when she hears about Caine for the first time. She’s still living with Marcellian in the colony and building bright, thick honeycomb light models when her dad starts talking about a new soldier in his troops in the comms he sends her. He leads one of the battalions of some of the promising new splices that haven’t quite gotten the kinks worked out. Like her.

Caine’s been slowly fighting his way up the ranks until finally someone decided that maybe he’d amount to something. It sounds like he’s a bit lonely. She includes a model for him too in her next package, a nice yellow one.

—

It had taken the splicers the longest to work out the gender issues.

Bees, for example, don’t have genders, per se. More like roles. Mapping these roles onto humans gets…complex. You don’t really splice in a new brain, of course, but you throw enough non-human DNA into the mix and your signals get crossed. It didn’t used to be a problem in her old life, but Earth humans are very committed to their binary genders. It confuses her for a while. Yes, she’s a girl, technically, but more importantly, she’s a worker. Queens are also girls but you don’t see her swanning about like she’s two steps away from being an Entitled.

Of course, the more advanced humans in the rest of the galaxy also haven’t had anything so primitive as a menstrual cycle for centuries, even if they still learn about them as an indicator of the less-advanced past, so these particular humans all clearly captive to their biology anyway.

Don’t even get a splicer started on the lizard problem.

—

At 14 she finally meets Caine when her dad brings him home on his planet leave. They’ve been writing back and forth for nearly three years, even though a fair amount of it gets censored due to Aegis confidentiality concerns. Sometimes if Caine tells her a particularly embarrassing story about her dad, she’ll get another letter from her dad a few days later informing her of how something really happened and why she shouldn’t listen to such a clearly biased observer.

He is endearing when he shows up at the colony though, puppyish in his eagerness to please and practically eating out of her dad’s hand. 

“This must be nice,” he says, sitting in the main room of the colony and fiddling with a ‘comb model as people constantly filter in and out and voices and giggles buzz in the background. “Having all these people like yourself around.”

Kiza smiles. “It is, yeah,” she says. “You’ve got Dad though.” 

She hasn't missed the adoring tone in Caine's letters when he's talking about him.

Caine chuckles and looks fondly over his shoulder into the other room, where the topic of their conversation is engaged in a heated debate over toast, and Kiza thinks he looks a little wistful. “The stories I could tell you about your dad now that he’s not secretly reading over my shoulder.”

She leans forward eagerly, elbows on her knees. “Please.”

—

The occasional snuck-in residual instinct aside, their brains are still mostly human, for better or worse. Bees, as her dad has been known to say when he suspects she’s trying to get out of something, don’t lie. Splices, however, have to lie all the time. 

What they’re doing, how much they know. How much they want to serve. How useful they’d like to be. Whether they’re more human or animal. Whether they think that animal will one day turn on them.

It’s not exclusively a question of lying to other people.

—

She’s 16 when her father comes home unexpectedly, looking tired, defeated, and wingless. Legionnaire court-martials are fast and ruthless.

“Pack up,” he says, roughly but not unkind. “We’re going to Earth.”

She’s heard a bit about the planet, but not much. Bit backwards, still. Plants mostly chlorophyll-based. Still has bees, but only just.

The “why” will filter out of him bit by bit over the coming years, but for now, he says nothing else.

—

They’d avoided splicing pack animals at first, but wolves had been too temptingly useful. She doesn’t know if someone had wanted to avoid any sort of strength in numbers problem or was worried about the mental stability of a colony splice forced to go solo. The latter seems like it would be an uncharacteristically selfless consideration.

They don’t go into the city all that often, preferring to stay out where they’re both more comfortable and less conspicuous. The colony they’ve cultivated around their new house isn’t quite the same, but it will suffice. Much like Caine needs his pack, they feel incomplete without the hive.

She doesn’t hate being on Earth, generally is quite fond of it even if she does miss her holoshower and the bright radiolectric parlours she’d sneak out to with her friends. But the buzzing that surrounds her is just slightly not quite in the right key.

—

Kiza is 19 when Caine comes “back from the goddamn dead” indeed.

They’d told themselves Caine hadn’t actually been dead, but a skyjacker without wings is halfway there already, and even more so when they’re dumped on one of the most dismal planets the galaxy has to offer. 

Strolling in through their door with a princess, no less. He would.

She’s not entirely surprised to come home from the store barely two hours later to Caine gone, their yard a mess, and her dad with a tissue shoved up his nose and nursing a wicked sonic cannon headache.

“Guess we won’t be needing all this then,” she shrugs and turns to put the groceries in the fridge but a can of tomatoes hits the floor with a thunk as she doubles over coughing, nearly following the fruit to the ground.

Once it passes she looks up to see her father watching her, eyes narrowed and mouth pursed in a way she hasn’t seen for years, and thinks, _well, fuck_.

—-

There is always some error when humanity is involved. A junk DNA strand that turns out to be quite important once you leave it out, for example. Or put it in, but in the wrong context. Even the most skilled splicers can’t account for every possible mutation once the genes are set into their new homes.

Sometimes they don’t matter. Other times they can be fixed for the price of a therapy vial, should you have the contacts and the credits. Rare occasions, they turn on their host and only an even more expensive visit back to your maker will save you—assuming you can make it that long and your creator’s even still alive and coherent. 

A more cynical person might suspect a planned obsolescence strategy, but Kiza still tries not to be too jaded.

—

Finally, after the bureaucratic dust settles, her father comes back with Caine, a princess, and a pardon. And a vial of Recode that she takes on the couch where she’s been wrapped in a blanket because despite her insistence that she’d be fine in his absence she does feel like she deserves a small wallow.

“What the hell do we do now,” Her Majes—Jupiter says, looking strangely young and very tired.

Kiza shrugs. “You adapt.”


End file.
